


I Can't Believe My Eyes (You're The Boy of My Dreams)

by HerbertBest



Category: Good Game (TV 2017), Ninja Sex Party (Band)
Genre: Concerts, Crack, Crack Treated Seriously, Falling In Love, First Time Blow Jobs, First Time Bottoming, First Time Topping, Humor, Love at First Sight, M/M, Murderous Ninjas, Ninjas - Freeform, Pizza, Running Away, Self-cest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-16
Updated: 2018-04-16
Packaged: 2019-04-23 15:14:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14335236
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HerbertBest/pseuds/HerbertBest
Summary: Alex and Ryland attend a Ninja Sex Party concert, and the lead singer develops an attraction toward Alex.  When all of their armor comes off during a one night stand and Alex meets the "real" Danny Sexbang, will he realize that Danny's the one for him and accept his request to run away with him?





	I Can't Believe My Eyes (You're The Boy of My Dreams)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Fallenandscatteredpetals](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fallenandscatteredpetals/gifts).



“Hey Ryland – ARE YOU READY TO ROCK?”

Ryland – drooling as he was – managed to sit up, blinking over at Alex in confusing. He tossed his tangled hair back up and over his shoulder and glanced over into the doorway. “Dude. Why the fuck are you wearing a crop top?”

Alex was indeed wearing a crop top. “It’s 80’s fashion!” Alex said with great enthusiasm. “NSP ARE an 80s band! You have to dress up! Where’d you leave those dark red tights Ash got you for Valentine’s Day?”

“They’re orange, and I threw them away,” he groaned. “I wanted to burn them but you know her.” A cocky grin. “She kinda loves me in leather.”

Ryland couldn’t have hurt Alex more. It took him a moment to steady, to bite back the bitterness. “Just get out of bed! We can’t be late! If we’re late I’ll lose my spot at the front of the line, which’ll be a total freaking bummer.”

Ryland climbed out of bed, then haphazardly made it while Alex picked through the rest of the clothing. He pulled out a shiny silver jacket with wide lapels, a band teeshirt, and a pair of old, ripped jeans. “We’ll start with these,” he said quite judiciously. “Go grab a shower and wash your hair, I’ll make breakfast-dinner-something!”

“Do we even have breakfast food?” Ryland wondered.

“You have bacon and I have Special K.” Alex cracked his back as he leaned against the doorframe, and he wished for the millionth time that he had stretched his morning. Or had a smoke. Anything to prepare him for the good time that was hopefully ahead of him tonight.

“Right. So someone forgot to go shopping again.” He grunted. 

Alex frowned. Whose turn had it been this week? He’d thought it was Ryland’s, but he didn’t push it. “I was planning on going but you remember that the meeting ran longer than we thought it would,” he said. “Forget cooking, man. We can always get some food after the concert.”

“Mmm hmm,” said Ryland, in a distant tone that automatically made Alex worry. He’d been moody, a little lost, since their plans to go to Florida and train with their Blood Match fell through. Alex had tried to cheer him up – the concert tickets were in fact his best attempt at making him smile – but Ryland only seemed to be entertained when he was in Ash’s presence. Alex didn’t push them apart – indeed anything that made Ryland happy was a positive thing at this point. Instead he tried to rouse him out of bed, encouraged him to keep looking for a ‘real job’ while avoiding any hope of landing one himself, stayed on the even steady course toward complete and total slack laziness while walking dogs and tending bars and trying to keep the team motivated as they moved on to the next movement.

Frankly, all of the pushing and pulling made Alex crave the irresponsibility and freedom of music. The way he normally craved drugs. 

Mmm. Drugs.

Ryland kept heaving and sighing and groaning his way toward the shower, which was enough to annoy Alex thoroughly. “If you don’t want to go, I’m going to go by myself.”

Ryland blinked at him sleepily. “If you don’t want me to come, just say so.”

Alex recognized the manipulation involved in Ryland’s words, but couldn’t stop himself from pouting. “You could be more excited!”

“I don’t get excited,” Ryland said, flatly. 

“What a shame for poor ol’ Ash,” said Alex, deadpan. 

Ryland snorted. He stripped off his shirt, and Alex’s mouth went dry. UGH. He didn’t want to think about his dumb crush on Ryland, not when Ryland wasn’t even close to reciprocating those feelings, not when he was being such a butt to him. Alex turned his head as Ryland finally headed to the bathroom with a change of clothes looped over his forearm.

That gave Alex distance to comfort-eat himself toward some kind of emotional epiphany that refused to come. When the food failed him, he turned the joint he’d squirreled away in the top drawer of the kitchen (right beside the ice cream scoop and the melon baller, which Ryland never wanted and never thought to look for). By the time Ryland finally showed up in bright-green hammer pants and a blue shirt, Alex stank of weed and was smirking glassily at the wall.

Which started up Ryland’s eternal complaints about how he ‘got’ whenever he got high. Alex’s floaty, pleasant momentary buzz kept him moving, let him completely ignore his friend’s complaints and his somewhat dizzying sense of feeling out of place. The feeling evened out into annoyance by the time they got to the stage door. Then he tuned Ryland out completely.

Music was still better than any other narcotic in the world, after all.

*** 

Alex found them positions near the front of the stage and started bouncing up and down during the opening act, which involved a bunch of guys dressed like robots grinding their surprisingly plump posteriors to the sound of funky seventies disco rock. Ryland found them beers and tried to look less marginal while Alex yelled every lyric, bouncing on the balls of his feet in sympathy with the music, his hair bouncing and flying with his every gesture and motion.

Ryland kept pounding his beer and rolling his eyes. Even when Ninja Sex Party finally hit the scene and swung into their twenty-minute opening number, a synth opera about a giant cock that tries to take over the world.

Alex wiped away a tear as the number finished and they started singing Road Trip, but Ryland didn’t notice.

His emotions were all over the place as the concert kept progressing. There were heart-stopping ballads, romantic songs, goofy mid-tempo numbers, sex jams. Alex was a wrung-out, sweaty, grinning, laughing mess by the time it was all over. 

Ryland had finished two hot dogs and two cups of beer and was well on his way to finishing the third when the crowd began to thin.

Alex only realized upon further, private reflection that the lead singer was totally winking at him, and he so didn’t squeak about it like a tiny teenage girl when he realized that Danny Sexbang had actually noticed him.

That would be something private, a little secret just for him. One that wasn’t Ryland’s business and something that he didn’t need to justify to him to make it make sense in his own head.

When the last song played and the band took its bows to the ringing applause of the small club, Ryland beat a retreat for the exit, but a roadie in a wrinkled Blondie shirt tapped Alex on the shoulder.

“Yo. Sexbang wants you,” he said. 

Alex blinked at him in confusion, unable to properly parse what the man before him was telling him. “Wants me for what?”

The roadie rolled his eyes. “Duh. Backstage.”

“Isn’t he like,” Ryland said, between chomps of hot dog, “one of the straightest dues in the history of the world?”

The bodyguard rolled his eyes. “It’s called theatre. You want to go backstage or not?”

Alex considered his options for a grand total of three seconds before eagerly nodding. The guard smirked, and handed him a bright blue wrist tag. He looped it about his wrist and followed the guard, trailing Ryland behind him. It was a short walk up on the stage and to the left, several doors away from the front of the club, where there was a golden door with a bright blue star taped crookedly to it. The guard knocked twice upon the door, and then came a soft, warm, gentle voice from behind the layers of wood and brass.

“Bring him in, Maynard.”

Alex’s knees knocked together as the door opened. To his surprised, Sexbang wasn’t dressed up in a unitard; he was wearing jeans, a towel looped around his neck, apparently fresh from the shower. The wild mane of hair that hair framed his face was limp and wet, and he was red-cheeked from the presumptive steam of his idyll.

“Hello,” he said, smooth as you please, and Alex’s heard and lungs gave a simultaneous, fluttering tremble that he would normally consider quite alarming. No woman had ever made him feel this way, and he’d subjected himself to many women before this night…okay, maybe three of four of them. Five, if you counted the time he kissed his cousin Elisa on the cheek during Purim…

Silence. Then suddenly there was a nudge to his shoulderblade. “He said we should go in,” whispered Ryland.

So in they went. To Alex’s amazement, Sexbang didn’t pay attention to Ryland – instead he grabbed a chair for Alex, bade him sit down, then gave him a kiss on the cheek and a red rose. 

“You know,” he declared, with deep import, “why I asked for you, don’t you?”

“No!” Alex blurted out, while Ryland snickered into his palm. “I mean,” Alex quickly corrected himself, “I don’t understand why you picked me. I thought you picked Ryland – everyone loves Ryland.” Including Alex himself, though he didn’t bother to voice this thought as his oblivious friend stood by and finished his hot dog. “I’m just another guy in the crowd, you know. Everyone else is so…” he trailed off, made shapes in the air, unable to explain himself with words. 

“Special?” Danny asked. Alex nodded. Danny frowned. “You seem to be one of those guys who spends a lot of time telling other people how fucking rad they are without giving themselves the same big ups.”

“I don’t like to brag. I like making people feel good,” he said, then flushed.

Sexbang’s grin was licentious. “Me too,” he said. “As a matter of fact, there were some amazingly beautiful Venusians I met the other day when I was saving the galaxy from the evil God Kondom. And I made them feel good. So fucking good.”

Alex had no idea what to say to that, but his big eyes went even wider. “You’ve really been to Venus?”

“Sure. Someday I’ll take you there; we’ll cruise on the old Tiem Musheen to the furthest reaches of the galaxy.”

“You’re both crazy,” said Ryland flatly, but they ignored him.

Fluidly, Sexbang reached out across the distance, his hands finding Alex’s. “I admit I do have an ulterior motive in inviting you here. You see, I was made curious by the sight of you,” Sexbang said, in his formal, stilted way. “My bandmate, my trusty Ninja companion Brian, pointed out that you resemble me fairly closely.”

“I never noticed before,” said Alex. Self-consciously, he shifted in his seat and hoped that the singer didn’t find his looking so much like him to be an offensive action of some kind.

“I don’t see it myself. I’m so handsome that it’s hard to accurately duplicate me in erotic statuary, let alone in the flesh of another man,” he said. “But I wanted to gaze into your features myself to see if it was true. I’m not a man for hyperbole, but I can see where he got that idea from.”

“Oh,” Alex said quietly. “Thank you.”

“Now that that’s settled,” said Sexbang, “I require pizza. Brian! Have the limo called! We shall go to the nearest place and partake of some sweet sausage and shrooms!”

Alex burst forth with a quiet shriek as Ninja Brian materialized right beside him, his piercing blue eyes serious. He was wearing a plaid shirt and a pair of Dockers, but his ninja mask was still firmly in place. His eyes were steady on Alex’s place as he brought a whistle to his face and blew once on it, sharply. There was a prompt knock on the door, and standing there in a sharp livery uniform was…huh. Egoraptor. 

“Where to?” he asked.

“Oh, just to the local pizzeria. You don’t mind, do you?” 

“Fuck no! Not after you and Brian played my kid’s birthday party for free.”

Sexbang smiled. “Ahh, little Lily and-or-Violet. She’s growing so big.”

“Her name’s Monique,” Egoraptor said.

“Tell little Monique I hope she does well during her little dance recital. WE MUST BE OFF!” he said, clapping Alex on the shoulder. “Your hairy friend can come along, if you’d like.”

“His hairy friend?” said Ryland.

“My mistake. Come along with us, ratlike chum!” said Danny, donning swiftly a ripped up Taylor Swift teeshirt. He jabbed his long finger toward the door. “To the pizzatorium!”

*** 

Ten minutes later, Alex watched Sexbang as he pressed his face to the front glass of a crane machine, maneuvering the long mechanical arm to drop a stuffed animal into its belly. He pouted as he lost the toy and tried again, between big bites of his pizza.

“Why are you looking at him like that?” Ryland was half-asleep, sitting across from Alex, who startled and turned toward him when he spoke up. 

“Like what?” he asked, genuinely, visibly confused. He didn’t think that he’d been watching Sexbang in a different way. He’d just been admiring his technique and trying to keep an eye on Ninja Brian, whose ability to appear out of nowhere frankly creeped Alex out.

“Like you think he’s hot. I know you’ve always swung both ways, like, I think that’s cool,” said Ryland, “but he’s some big rockstar, dude. You’re gonna get your heart broken up.”

“By Danny Sexbang? Like the greatest lover in the history of the universe?”

“According to him,” said Ryland dismissively. 

Alex shook his head sadly. “Dude, I think everything between us’ll be okay. It’s just a harmless little crush. I just…wanna be like him.”

“And you also wanted to be like David Bowie,” said Ryland. “That didn’t turn out good for either of you.”

“Don’t insult David Bowie!” Gasped Alex. “He’s everywhere now!”

Ryland peered over his shoulder before taking a sip of soda. “I would never speak ill of the Bowie,” he said.” Then, aside to Ego, he asked, “how are you holding up?”

“I haven’t been home in two months,” he said.

“Oh,” Ryland said.

“I slept in these clothes last night. Ninja Brian commanded shotgun, and when he goes shotgun you can’t argue with the dude. I’ve been stabbed six times,” he said, and belted down more beer. “A stripper in Oswego stabbed me in the face with her heel a couple of stops ago.”

“Sorry about that.” Ryland looked uncomfortable.

“I should be grateful since Danny picked me up out of a bus station.”

“That’s not always the best…” Ryland trailed off as Ego began to cry.

“I miss my family…”

“Want another piece of pizza?” Ryland asked.

“Yes please,” he said between sniffles, and Ryland awkwardly patted his shoulder and stared at Alex. “This is the kind of life you’re signing up for if things go any further with this guy, dude,” he said.

“Nothing’s going to happen, Ryland. I’m just some guy he took out on a pizza date. It’s not going anywhere and I’m not going to….” He blinked as Sexbang appeared beside him, holding out a large stuffed blue rabbit. Alex made an unholy squeaking noise and crushed the stuffed animal to his chest, wincing as it made an alarming clinking sound.

“It has some glass in it. from where Ninja Brian broke open the case!” Sexbang chirped out, wide-eyed. The ninja was, in fact, stabbing away at the shattered claw machine with a very sharp-looking knife. “We should go now,” Sexbang added almost as an afterthought, and pulled back the chair Alex had been sitting in. Ryland groaned, stuffing the last of their pizza into his muth.

“Do I have to roll out the bullet proof codpieces, sir?” asked Ego, trying to plot away the tomato sauce stains on his pants.

“I don’t know,” said Danny. “But I think we should leave super quickly. If you have heels, take ‘em off!” he yelled, and grabbed Alex by the hand, running away as fast as he could to the parking lot.

*** 

Ego was a very fast driver. Alex had no idea how the man had gained his skills, but he applied them very well to the problem at hand. 

Of course Ninja Brian had stabbed his way out of the place. That was probably a pretty huge factor. Alex was going to have to ask him for laundry tips, his sneakers and jeans were ruined with blood.

Soon they were at a very palatial looking hotel, and Sexbang was climbing out of the car and reaching for his hand. 

“Alex, I don’t ask many men this…well, very many men…But I’d be delighted if you’d agree to come upstairs with me.”

“I…” he glanced at Ryland, who looked beyond miffed about Alex’s fairytale-quality date. “Wait, where should my friend go?”

Danny laughed, a loud sound that sounded just a tad bit hysterical to Alex’s sensitive ears. “Oh, I’m sure Ninja Brian and Ego would be delighted to take him back home! Wouldn’t you, boys?”

“Anything that brings me closer to coming home is a blessing,” said Ego flatly. He was texting rampantly and didn’t bother to look up when he spoke.

Ninja Brian kept wiping the blood off of his knife, staring at Ryland like he was the next enemy. Ryland gulped.

“I’m going to go to Ash’s place,” he said. “Do you know where West Orange Street is?”

“Somewhere on the west side of town,” said Ego. “I’ll let the Ninja out to meditate before he gets too cranky,” he said quietly. 

There was a piercing glare from Ninja Brian, but he said nothing to correct Ego’s estimation of the situation.

“All right. If you need me, call me,” said Ryland. There was a distant note of protectiveness in voice but Alex didn’t make much of it. Instead he squeezed Sexbang’s hand and followed him into the brightly-lit, fancy-looking lobby of the hotel.

 

*** 

Sexbang’s room was on the top floor, a huge suite at the end of the line with a very large sunken living room with a blue shag carpet and lava lamps all over the place. Alex had expecting something a little more blinding, but he supposed that it wasn’t possible to travel from pillar to post with a unicorn in one’s back pocket.

When the door shut, he turned and nervously looked back at Sexbang. His hair had dried into a frizz, and some blood had stained his Taylor Swift teeshirt. “Would you like to sit down? Do you drink?” he said.

“Yes please to both,” said Alex. Sexbang brought him a single glass of wine and he slammed it and reached for another.

Sexbang raised an eyebrow, handing over the bottle before stripping his shirt off and unbuckling his jeans. Alex turned beet red; even slightly tipsy as he was, he couldn’t force himself to meet Sexbang’s eyes as he got down to his rather bright boxer shorts.

“Alex, I know I’ve only known you for a few hours- but I feel as if we’ve run into something truly special.” He sat down on the edge of the rather large, horseshoe-shaped bed that dominated the opposite end of the room. “I don’t know if you feel that way too, but I understand my own feelings completely. While I’ve met many beautiful women, never have I been so attracted to someone of my own gender.”

Pausing at those words, Alex tilted his head. “You said you’ve been with other men before.”

Anxiety momentarily flashed through Sexbang’s expression, but he recovered quickly. “Well, by that I mean that I’ve never been with someone who so easily understood what kind of person I am. Underneath the glitter and the future saving and the boots and the restraining orders and the syphilis tests…”

“Wait, syphilis?”

“ALL OF THEM ARE NEGATIVE!” Sexbang yelled. Alex recoiled a bit. He sipped more wine, letting the drugging glow of it spread through his veins. Sexbang leaned in, watching Alex’s expression closely. “If you’re not comfortable with this,” he said, “we don’t need to go further. I’d rather have a sober lover.”

Alex gave him a weak smile. “I haven’t been sober in a long time,” he warned Sexbang.

“Do you have a drinking problem?” Sexbang asked.

“It’s not a problem, it’s more of a…thing I use to fill time,” he said. “I mean, after my last two bands went bust on me, I ended up sticking around the house more and more, and since I was all alone except for Ryland, I needed a way to make people like me. So I started drinking a lot.”

Sexbang’s look turned concerned. “You know you don’t need alcohol to be an interesting person, don’t you?” he asked.

“Of course,” insisted Alex. “I felt like I need to do it. Drunk Alex has like, authority and swagger. People like drunk Alex better than they like me when I’m not.”

Sexbang traced the long vein in Alex’s arm, his smile wavering slightly. “Maybe,” he said, “you should try to see how you are without the alcohol. And who you are without your grumpy, mean friend.”

“I like Ryland,” he said. “He’s my best friend.”

“But are you his?” Alex looked away, shamefaced. “That’s the problem,” he said. “Never give your heart without getting something back. Otherwise, just run away. Save your pretty heart for someone who cherishes it.”

Alex looked at Sexbang then, really and truly looked up at him. “What about your heart?” he asked. “You give it away all the time.”

Sexbang winced. “I don’t find love as readily as you think I do. Well, not true love. But I’m a man of pleasure,” he said. “I give myself to it absolutely. And I like to spread it as much as I can!”

“But,” said Alex, “what about your heart? If you’re spending your whole life guarding it and keeping it from being touched – how can you really be happy like that? The selfishness of it is so…mean. Mean to yourself and mean to the people who want to love you. So not the guy I’ve been admiring from a distance for so long.”

Sexbang said, “It’s not worth getting hurt. Even by someone who feels as strangely familiar. Sometimes…sometimes when I touch you, it’s like touching myself. Like I’m stroking my own ungainly hand. When you look at me – I feel joy. And I know it’s new, and I know it might not last – Great Gods of Lube and Glitter, I know it doesn’t last with me – but I want to see if it might with you. I want to see if we might have meaning in the long run. You’re special, Alex Totham…”

“Taylor.”

“Fuck! Taylor, sorry, I meant Taylor,” he said quickly. 

Alex let the words soak into this mind, into his skin. The situation was heavy enough to make him wonder if Sexbang was just trying to go the extra mile to seduce him, but at the moment – in the moment – he couldn’t care less. 

Alex put the bottle aside. He kicked off his oversized sneakers and he pulled off his multiple layers of socks. He stood up and let the furry, silky sensation of the carpet weave its way up between his toes. 

“Sexbang,” he said. “I’m ready to be seduced now.”

Sexbang grinned. He led Alex out of the sunken living room, to the enormous bed, and sat down on the edge. “One thing,” he said, before he turned the lights down and put on some rather emphatically loud Kenny G.

“What?” Alex asked, reclining across the bed. “Anything.”

“If you’re going to kiss me,” Sexbang said, pressing his skinny body close to Alex’s, “You really have to like, call me Danny.”

“Oh Danny,” mumbled Alex against his mouth, parting his lips, letting Danny slide his tongue between his lips. “Danny, Danny, Danny.”

The rest of what he said was muffled away by the other man’s kiss, by his eager touches and his curious exploration, their bodies melding neatly, hungrily into one. 

 

*** 

It didn’t occur to Alex until Danny was sucking his cock that Danny was a virgin at the whole dude/dude sex thing – just like him, besides a few fumbling, desperate moments of exploration in college with some former bandmates. The rampant choking and the awkward inability to properly deep-throat his cock were huge giveaways, but it was rude to talk with your mouth full of cock, and Alex’s own hands and mouth and tongue were busy. He was dizzy, erotic experience, and Alex writhed against Danny’s touch, came into his mouth, his hands, and his ass.

Danny Sexbang was a bottom. Who knew?

Alex didn’t even know if he was a top, but he did understand that Danny needed Alex’s dick in his ass – so he rolled a condom onto him, got some lube together, and complied. It was warmer than a woman – tighter. Danny cried out musically, his orgasmic noises a song all their own. Alex knelt over him, impressed, confused and delighted by the amount of pleasure he’d been given.

Their clumsiness was evident - to Alex, painfully so as he groped blindly around for the right grip, the right purchase, the thing that would make Danny the happiest. But Danny was satisfied. Alex could taste the bitterness on the back of his tongue that proved it.

When they kissed again it was like kissing himself, like kissing the sweetest, most secretive part of himself, the part that had been lonely, longing, looking for someone like him to hold on to for the rest of his life.

In the afterglow, half asleep, they stared up at the pastel-pink ceiling. “Did I tell you one of my bands was an NSP cover band?”

“You were in an NSP cover band?” For some reason, this excited Danny. “Pictures please! Pictures, costumes, anything you’ve got, I wanna see it all!”

Alex had to grope around on the floor for his phone, but he found the cloud where he’d stashed his old pictures. Danny whopped in delight, dragging the phone close to his nose, his hair a tumult of curls. He laughed and smiled at the sight, but never in a mean way, never in a way that made Alex feel horrible to have shared the information.

“So what happened to your band?”

Alex frowned. “They decided to dump me. I was the only one who really cared about it anyway.”

Danny frowned. “It took me a lot of bands to find the right group of guys,” he admitted. “The group of guys I have now I’d lie down my life for.” He tucked his knees under his chin and said, “Do you have anyone in your life like that?”

“Well, I have a killcore team. They’ve gotten really close to me,” Alex said. “I have a best friend and his name’s Ryland – I can’t imagine my life without him sometimes.” The unspoken tension that sizzled through those words made Danny frown. “But,” said Alex, “he’s not into me. Not like that.”

Danny tilted his head. “Not the way you wish he was?” Alex flushed dully. “You don’t…aren’t in love with him, are you?”

Alex sighed. “I thought I was until tonight.”

“What are you afraid of?”

Alex reached over the side of the bed for his boxers and pulled them on. “That all of this is going to disappear in the morning. You’ll ask me to go away and I’ll have to go away. I’ll never see you again. I mean, you fucked a whole planet and then blew up on the sun, how can I compete with that?”

Danny shook his head. “Alex, dude, that’s just a song.”

Alex stared at him in horror. “But music never lies.”

“Sometimes it…stretches the truth a little bit. There wasn’t a real Mister Roboto…”

Alex gasped again.

Danny said, “even when the music isn’t being truthful, there’s always love. I really did mean it, when I said I don’t just randomly sleep with every dude I meet.”

“But you do with every woman you meet?”

Danny winced. He sprawled himself out on the bed, looking all the more like a helpless, lonely starfish. “Even that’s kind of pushing it. Please don’t tell anyone, I’ll like, have to jump off of a building or something.”

Alex looked at Danny then, and it was as if it were the first time he’d really seen him. Alex wondered if he really was that vulnerable, really was just a normal, regular guy underneath his clothing. 

“Speaking of pushing it,” he said. “I have five more dates to finish off – two LA shows, then we go to Portland and Tacoma. I know you don’t have a passport on you, so I won’t ask you to come to Toronto with us. But how do you feel about a road trip?”

Alex let the words jostle about in his head. If he left abruptly, what would Ryland do? How would he feel about it? 

And how much would Alex regret never seeing Danny again if he said no, and went back to his ordinary life?

“Will you let me go make a call?” he asked.

Danny frowned. “First thing you need to know about me is that I’m not a ‘make someone do something’ kind of guy.”

Alex smiled, and felt around in the deep shag carpeting for his phone.

 

*** 

 

“Hey, Ryland…So Danny and I kind of hit it off. He said he needed me and for the first time in a long time I felt like somebody really wanted me around. So when he asked me to come with him for a few days, I said yes. I’ll call you when I’m back in town. Bye.”

Alex took a deep breath and pushed his phone into the front pocket of his jacket. Danny was standing on the top step of the tour bus, and he ascended toward him, their hands locking together.

As they kissed the phone buzzed in Alex’s pocket, unanswered.


End file.
